There are more than 2,000 verses in the Bible that instruct us to take care of the poor and needy, the foreigner, the stranger. Beyond donating money, this call challenges us to get to know them, to help where they need help, to value them, to love them. This book is an impassioned plea for us to treat them as neighbors.

Check out Pat’s Radio Interview with Benji Cole from CBS Radio- People of Distinction:

Exodus: Our Story, Too! weaves together the trials of the Israelites in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan with the stages of the classical spiritual journey: Awakening, Purgation, Illumination and Union. To read this story is to see where each of us is on this journey and what we have left to do to enter the kingdom of God. The longest part of the journey is purgation, the giving up of our rebellious nature, the owning of all that we are, all that we have said and done and what was done to us, the releasing of our own world-centered views of how our lives should go in favor of loving God, of following Him wherever He would take us and finally entering into a full partnership with God in our lives. Then we live out our lives as we were created to be, living fully, purposefully and in peace.

Over the Christian centuries the teaching about the kingdom of God has followed a pretty narrow pattern. The kingdom was heaven where believers in Jesus as the son of God, if they had been true to the letter of the law, would go after they died. This interpretation has ignored much of what Jesus said about the kingdom in His parables and teachings and focused on us being “letter-of-the-law” people. But Jesus was about the Spirit of the Law, that is following the essence of the law in every situation, not being sure to cross every “I” and dot every “t.”